4 days ago
So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore it?
Mike Regalia knows exactly where he was when he heard Elvis Presley had died: deep into restoring a Shelby 289 Cobra for Bruce Meyer, the Beverly Hills real estate scion and prominent collector who today owns swaths of Rodeo Drive.
'I had stripped it to bare metal, welded up a bunch of cracks and was in the booth painting it,' says Regalia, who spent months in 1977 getting the roadster from an unfortunate salmon-y hue to an arresting red, among other refurbishments. He heard the announcement about The King of Rock and Roll over the radio in his garage: 'I'll never forget it.'
